Blu Sensation

They're starting to fill the racks in video stores, in packages that look like the shorter siblings of DVDs. Netflix carries nearly 1,400 of them, along with 100,000 of the old models. They are Blu-ray discs. This Sony video format, having won a staring contest with rival HD DVD, is now officially the next generation in home entertainment. The promise is that movies will look better than ever, duplicating and perhaps surpassing the big-screen experience. Manufacturers and film companies, investing zillions in the process, want you to say, Wow! But first they want you to buy the stuff. A Blu-ray player is about $200 to $700, and the discs cost a few dollars more than DVDs.

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The producers are pinning their hopes on Blu-ray for a simple reason: the DVD business, which accounts for most of their revenue, is in the doldrums, and a new format might spur a worldwide shopping spree for the latest application of a cool gimmick--like for PlayStation 3 or Wii, only more so. Yeah, but money's tight these days. Consumers want to know if they have to buy a Blu-ray or whether it's just an incremental improvement that will soon be rendered obsolete when high-quality movie downloads from the Internet become available. (See the top 10 gadgets of 2008.)

We wondered too. So we bought a Blu-ray player and watched a couple of dozen current and classic movies on it. Here are some first thoughts from a veteran movie critic (who, trust us, is in no way a techno-whiz).

Why to Get It

Pop in some treasured oldie like John Ford's 1956 western The Searchers (a frequent entry point for Blu-ray connoisseurs), and voilà! Instant enlightenment. As the '40s film critic Cecilia Ager said when Citizen Kane opened, "It's as though you had never seen a movie before." Colors and textures are richly, plausibly vibrant, with an astonishing depth of field; all those Fordian shots of the Plains as seen from a ranch-house door lend equal clarity to the foreground and the far horizon. Blu-ray gives a 3-D impression, as if the figures in a scene were in your room; you could almost walk among and touch them. The sensation is the same with old black-and-white films like The Third Man, where the Vienna streets gleam with an almost erotic palpability. Any movie that looks good in another format--Sleeping Beauty, Raging Bull, Chungking Express, The Passion of the Christ--will look better on Blu-ray. Different, deeper, better. Realer.

Blu-ray also has a practical advantage: DVDs can be played on it. Every other upgrade in home entertainment--from 16 mm to laser disc to VHS and DVD--has meant the obsolescence of the previous format. This time you can embrace the new technology without mothballing your DVD collection. No awful separation anxiety. (See the top 10 movie performances of 2008.)

As for the next-next generation of digital downloads, that will take a while--maybe quite a while. Bandwidth is still a problem; visual quality lags behind that of standard DVDs. What Blu-ray offers could be matched or exceeded by the Internet within a decade, but we believe tech maven David Carnoy, who writes on the authoritative website CNET, "Digital downloads will not eliminate the need for discs anytime soon."

And Why Not To

DVDs are fine. We thought so before Blu-ray and still do. They were a big advance over videocassettes in clarity and durability; whereas a cassette, like a vinyl record or an eight-track, deteriorated simply by being played, DVDs don't erode with age. The Searchers, The Third Man, The Dark Knight and WALL•E all look terrific on DVD. As terrific as on Blu-ray? Not quite. But what are we, eye doctors?

For better or worse, most fans don't want to study a movie; they want to watch it. The images serve the story, not the other way around. Blu-ray's crystal clarity, if people notice it, might actually detract from their involvement in the film. And the majority of movies can't be called visually sumptuous. You could watch a Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler picture on the oldest TV set, with tinfoil on the rabbit ears, and not miss the important stuff: the comic spectacle of men behaving like boys.

Even some high-end critics who cherish film as a visual art aren't sold on the format. "I did buy a Blu-ray," says Jim Emerson, whose cogent blog Scanners runs on rogerebert.com "and I feel like a sucker. To me, some DVDs look more like 35 mm than Blu-ray does. In another 10 years, who is going to need a plastic physical disc to store digitized information? I think Blu-ray is a transitional format that won't last long."

But 10 years is a lifetime in entertainment technology; it's about as long as the age of DVD. Until the digital millennium arrives, Blu-ray is the best, and best-looking, way to see movies at home. It's less than a revolution but more than a gimmick.

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